A novel manufacturing strategy based on continuous processing integrated with online monitoring tools coupled with efficient automatic feedback control system is highly desired for efficient Quality by Design (QbD) based manufacturing of the next generation of pharmaceutical products with optimal consumption of time, space and resources. In this manuscript, an efficient plant-wide control strat...

The Center for Electronic Commerce (CEC) embodies over fourteen years of experience in applying agents to industrial problems. We have found such a fit in three areas: coordination of industrial designers, simulation and modeling of complex products and processes, and scheduling and control of production systems. This presentation outlines several trends in modern manufacturing, describes how t...

The introduction of CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing) systems in the 1980s, aiming at integrating automatic workstations into fully automated factories, was not successful. The root causes of this failure were that the subsystems to be integrated were not suitably designed for easy integration into a larger system. This situation stimulated the authors to embark on a research programme on...

Parts or products from high performance metal are very expensive, partly due to the processing complexities during manufacturing. Recent studies have indicated that hybrid processes of additive manufacturing and machining process can be used to repair titanium parts, thus extending the service life. In order to implement these methods automatically, it is necessary to obtain the spatial geometr...

As usage of simulation analyses becomes steadily more important in the design, operation, and continuous improvement of manufacturing systems (and historically, manufacturing was the sector of the economy first eagerly embracing simulation technology), the incentive to construct generic simulation models amenable to repeated application increases. Such generic models not only make individual si...

The application of AI planning techniques to manufacturing systems is being widely deployed for all the tasks involved in the process, from product design to production planning and control. One of these problems is the automatic generation of control sequences for the entire manufacturing system in such a way that final plans can be directly used as the sequential control programs which drive ...

This paper considers the simultaneous scheduling of material handling transporters (such as Automatic Guided Vehicles or AGVs) and manufacturing equipment (such as machines and workcenters) in the production of complex assembled products. Given the shipping schedule for the end-items, the objective of the integrated problem is to minimize the cumulative lead time of the overall production sched...

We present a semi-automatic solution to the problem of customized 3-D shape modeling using a rule based system. The solution is illustrated with the use case of hearing aid manufacturing. The current process of manufacturing customized hearing aids consists of many manual steps, all of which require expert knowledge. The idea is to translate this expert knowledge into machine readable rules usi...

The ever-increasing cost of labour in the textile industries coupled with rapid advances in technology has resulted in the automation of most sections in the present textile manufacturing industry. The recent addition to the automation drive, mostly in the last decade, has been substantial research in applying machine vision tools to replace humans for tasks such as inspection, textile characte...

Short term decision support for manufacturing systems is generally difficult because of the initial data needed by the calculations. Previous works suggest the use of a discrete event observer in order to retrieve these data from a virtual copy of the workshop, as up to date as possible at any time. This proposal offered many perspectives, but suffers from the difficulties to generate a decisio...